Burt Bacharach will play the hits of his life in music on Saturday in Rancho Mirage

As Burt Bacharach talks what moves him to leave the comforts of home and head out for one of the rare live shows he still plays, the legendary composer of countless pop classics starts to sound a little like the protagonist in “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” perhaps the most famous of the dozens of hits he and collaborator Hal David wrote together.

“It makes me feel a little more grounded,” Bacharach says by phone recently from his Los Angeles home, just an hour or two after the news broke that President Donald Trump had described many poorer countries around the world with a crude obscenity. “I get very upset with things that are going on, you know. To have the president just say people from the “s-holes,” we don’t need them?

“So this is my form of kind of insulating myself,” he says. “Let me get on stage, let me make myself feel good playing music for people who might also like to feel good.

“If I can make them feel good and touch their heart – whether it’s ‘That’s What Friends Are For,’ or ‘What The World Needs Now Is Love’ – we are touching on things that have always been the most potent for me in writing and wanting to write from the heart, from the emotion.”

So raindrops might fall, but the blues, they won’t defeat him.

Bacharach plays the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage on Saturday, a show he promises will include as many of his hits as he can pack into it, a difficult task for a guy who has seven No. 1 singles – songs such as “The Look Of Love,” “This Guy’s In Love With You,” and “(They Long To Be) Close To You” – among his 73 Top 40 hits.

“We do a lot of complete songs, but we also do some medleys,” Bacharach says. “It’s like you’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place there. Do you do all of ‘Walk On By,’ or half of ‘Walk On By’? At least you touch on something that might have been somebody’s favorite, or they wanted to hear that particular song.”

Bacharach turns 90 in May, though he could easily pass for a decade or more younger. He collaborated on many of his biggest hits in the ’60s with lyricist David and singer Dionne Warwick, his muse and best interpreter.

“We worked in a little office in the Brill Building with a bad piano and a window that didn’t open up,” he says. “Our process was to start something, but we never really finished a song in one day. He’d go out to Long Island at the end of the work day just like he was working in an office, you know, and work on it. I would go to my apartment in New York and work on my end. And then we’d get together the next day.”

Some songs came quickly, but others, such as “Alfie,” the title tune to the Michael Caine movie of the same name, took him three weeks to come up with the music.

“That was a brilliant lyric and I just wanted to make it great because I thought it deserved to be,” Bacharach says. “Those words deserved to be important and have important music.”

His process for composing the music evolved from thinking not just of the melody, but how the entire orchestration might work, Bacharach says.

“I’m hearing what I want around those songs, where the strings would come in, how they would be played, so then there becomes, I guess, an inherent sound,” he says.

At times he’d write “dummy lyrics” to demonstrate to the musicians how they should play the notes.

“They know me and think I’m not so crazy, it makes sense,” Bacharach says. “So there’s a four-note figure for the trumpets, and I put maybe “Just holding on now” underneath the notes. Instead of that just being four music notes you will sing it into your trumpet. Right away you hear the ‘hold’ is stronger than the ‘just.’ It’s things like that that make more sense to me than just cold music notes.”

Occasionally the dummy lyrics ended up in the song, such as with “On My Own,” which his then-wife songwriter Carole Bayer Sager kept as the title of the song that became a No. 1 hit in 1986 for Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald, or even with “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” the Bacharach-David No. 1 hit sung by B.J. Thomas for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” soundtrack in 1969.

“I kept hearing that – ‘raindrops keep falling on my head’ – when I was scoring ‘Butch Cassidy,'” Bacharach says. “It was a dummy, but it just made sense. These guys, not a care in the world. Bolivian army is going to come down and kill them, but they’re careless and carefree.

“Though Hal tried to come up with other titles ‘Raindrops’ came to be the perfect one,” he says. “Sometimes maybe it’s just shot out of the cannon of the actual music itself. It says, ‘This feels right, these words sound right.’

“These things are kind of just natural. Nobody taught me. You don’t get to learn tricks like this.”

You also don’t get a vocalist like Warwick very often either, Bacharach says.

“Dionne was a perfect, perfect vehicle for us,” he says of the singer who recorded such Bacharach-David classics as “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” among many others. “The more I recorded with Dionne, musically I could see that she can go up a couple of steps more, she can go higher than that.

“So I could take more chances and get away with them,” he says. “She was a gift.”

Bacharach has a handful of other shows scheduled this winter, including a sold-out benefit on Wednesday, Jan. 17, at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach with Elvis Costello, his collaborator on the 1998 album “Painted From Memory,” to raise money for the horses killed and injured when the San Luis Rey Downs training center burned in the Lilac fire last year.

“When I’m finished talking with you I’ve got to go back to the piano and relearn everything we did on ‘Painted From Memory,'” Bacharach says. “I haven’t been on stage with Elvis since we made that record but that’s going to be exciting.”

And wherever he’s playing, he wants the audience to feel as good as he does when he takes the stage with his small band and three singers.

“I’m very grateful for how this life has been for me, this career,” Bacharach says. “If I can make you feel good I’m happy. That’s my plan.”

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.

Show featuring Burt Bacharach, left, and Elvis Costello raised more than $165,000 for victims of the fire last month at San Luis Rey Downs.Legendary hit-maker Burt Bacharach, left, teamed up with Elvis Costello on Wednesday at the Belly Up in Solana Beach to raise money for agencies that benefit victims of the Dec. 7 fire at San Luis Rey Downs. (Bryce Miller/San Diego Union-Tribune)

Bacharach, Costello team up to raise more than $165,000 in Solana Beach

Bryce Miller

When the night ended Wednesday at Belly Up, Burt Bacharach glad-handed those straining in the front row, Elvis Costello bowed and waved and actress Anjelica Huston lingered for photographs.

The star power translated to $165,000 raised in a few short hours to benefit organizations helping the local horse industry after the Dec. 7 wildfire that swept across San Luis Rey Downs in Bonsall.

That day was about losing 46 horses and burn injuries to two trainers. This night was about helping soothe some of the pain.

Mission accomplished.

Organizers said ticket sales from the sold-out show pulled in about $125,000. An auction minutes before the show hauled another $40,000-plus.

One woman bid $6,000 to sing “Close to You” on stage with Bacharach, then talked him into doing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” instead. Another bid $10,000 for a dinner date with jockey “Big Money Mike” Smith.”

Bacharach pecked away at his limitless catalogue, tickling the keys from “What’s New, Pussycat?” to “I Say a Little Prayer.” Costello and Bacharach also paired on songs from their Grammy-producing album, “Painted from Memory.”

Costello joked to the crowd that the duo had bumped off nominees that included Canadian icon Celine Dion, among others.

“And we’ve never been able to go to Montreal since,” he said.

Huston, who helped guide the pre-show auction, was introduced to trainer Joe Herrick – the man who was burned on 23 percent of his body while saving his horse Lovely Finish during the Lilac Fire.

Chit-chat led Huston to reveal that the Western-style belt buckle she wore was from the 1989 TV series “Lonesome Dove,” co-starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones and Danny Glover.

The Academy Award winner happily posed for a photo with Herrick.

Fitting, on a night that appropriately ended with the Bacharach mega-hit, “That’s What Friends Are For.”